AMD Unveils Ryzen Pro CPUs, Details on Ryzen 3 Chips

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AMD has announced its new lineup of Ryzen Pro CPUs, following up on its Epyc server launch earlier this month and, of course, the consumer desktop Ryzen 7 and 5 lines early this spring. AMD’s Pro CPU families tend to follow their desktop counterparts, though there are some exceptions. The Ryzen 5 1500X (3.5GHz base, 3.7GHz Turbo) is referred to as the Ryzen 5 Pro 1500, with the same stats. A quick guide is shown below:

This confirms some of the rumors we’ve seen around Ryzen 3 as well, assuming AMD keeps parity between the pro and consumer variants. The Ryzen 3 chips will be native quad cores compared with the Core i3’s dual-core + Hyper-Threading configuration.

It’s less clear how this will impact performance. Intel’s single-threaded perf is still a bit higher than AMD’s, clock-for-clock, but AMD’s SMT implementation has generally given it a larger boost than Intel gains from Hyper-Threading. It’ll be quite interesting to see how the two compare here, since AMD will still have a physical core advantage, but not the SMT implementation that has made chips like the Ryzen 5 1600X able to punch well above their weight class.

So why launch Pro CPUs, anyway?

This isn’t just a segmentation play for AMD, though that’s part of it. Pro parts come with certain guarantees from the company over component longevity and image stability. They also support security standards like secure boot, a firmware Trust Platform Module, and various Windows 10 Enterprise security features, though some of these aren’t limited to the Professional CPU variants. AMD also guarantees that chips will be available for at least two years, and that they’ll be warrantied for 36 months. Image stability means that driver software won’t change over at least this period, which makes it easier for businesses to deploy system images and update computers.

AMD has previously introduced its Professional lineup of CPUs, but its Bulldozer-derived architectures were much weaker than the Ryzen family. It’ll be interesting to see if more OEMs adopt the hardware this time around; AMD says “The world’s largest suppliers of commercial client desktops are expected to provide Ryzen PRO-based PCs to businesses worldwide in the second half of 2017. Ryzen PRO mobile is scheduled for the first half of 2018.” AMD’s overall financial position has already improved relative to where it was a year ago. Ryzen Pro should only add to that improvement — provided, of course, that AMD sees better adoption numbers than what it got for its Bulldozer-derived chips.